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inject_hotmail.com writes "The results are in: it's faster to send your data via an airborne carrier than it is through the pipes. As discussed Tuesday, a company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a "data card" strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data."

I fear that this might have been an unfair comparison, though. The pigeon was, after all, dedicated to only that one transfer.

For a more apples-to-apples comparison with most companies' networks, the pigeon should also be transporting:

- a porn DVD or two

- half the collection of lolcat movies on youtube

- and half the collection of funny clips

- a periodic refresh of Slashdot, in 1 second intervals.

- an IRC session on sexnet for the network admin. Logging connections doesn't apply to him, after all. You can contact him under the nickname Linda1991 faster than through the internal channels.

- a couple of managers' correspondence with the distressed widdow of a nigerian prince. Hey, they're only trying to help her.

- a trojan download or two, from those guys in marketing who got admin rights on their computer because they can't work without it. And now can't work without the latest animated gizmo off www.i-pwn-your-machine.ru.

- the keylogger traffic in the other direction from the couple more who already downloaded it.

Of course it's unfair. You can get a *LOT* of data on a flash card nowadays. They're selling 8 GB cards at the store I'm standing in for $25. And a pidgeon could easily carry 4 of these. Go 16 GB cards, same size, double the capacity.

It's the common confusion of speed vs latency. Speed is how much you can cram through the pipe in a given period, and at this, pigeons excel.

Latency is end-to-end, unloaded communication lag, and this is where pigeons do very poorly.

I must applaud the IT company for trying out a 'green' alternative to large volume data transfer, but I wonder how long it will take for Telkom to get new legislation passed that will outlaw this form of data transfer.

For the love of God, just don't try to send any data throgh it's secure socket...

This has been tried, but the pigeon's "secure" socket is not as "secure" as you would think. First of all it only holds a tiny amount of data, and secondly, there's a vulnerability which can cause your data to be dropped on random objects including statues, cars and people.

Replacing "speed" with "data rate" and making a few other substitutions, we have a question I find interesting. "What was the data rate of that particular laden African swallow?"

The story is missing an absolutely critical piece of info though - how much data there was. Without that knowledge, the story is pretty meaningless. If I transport 30 GB of data by thumb drive physically (whether by pigeon or car or whatever) in an hour, I can get it there far faster than my home cable modem. If it was 1 MB of d

The fact that offline methods can have higher bandwidth is nothing new or surprising - just shove a hard drive in the post or whatever, as you suggest, or for even more dramatic examples, the classic is a van or jumbo jet full of DVDs/hard drives.

There's nothing here that suggests the S African network is slow. Indeed, even on my home wifi, I can trivially move a hard drive, thumb drive or flash card between my two computers, much faster than th

Which would require a 5 megabit upload rate. There aren't many people on this planet that can get a domestic service that does that - even businesses would find it expensive. Best I could get here is a 4 Megabit, if a progressive company would put equipment in the local exchange.

Fine. So your data rate is higher. But the fact is, a carrier pigeon is only half-duplex, whereas your network connection, though slower, is full-duplex. I bet your carrier-pigeon vendor didn't talk about that part, did he?

Not only that, but his assistant kept touching my wife's ass, and after he wrapped up his sales presentation and left, we noticed all the silverware was gone. I'd advise all to keep well away from these carrier pigeon vendors, even if they seem slick.

Huh? You can't send pigeons both ways at the same time? As far as I know, you can pipeline pigeons too. I guess if you're talking about the one pigeon it's not gonna "home" both ways, but one data packet doesn't go both ways on an electronic network either.

Perhaps the network is congested with traffic going to other continents travelling across the same networks as used for this experiment. Once the fiber is installed then this international traffic will be routed more efficiently to the outside world, lowering network congestion and allowing higher speeds to transfers between peers in SA.

with the size of USB drives you can buy for under $20, I would dare to say that the same experiment would probably have the same results over here in the states (at least with cable and DSL). If I strapped just an 8GB USB drive to a pigeon's leg and had it fly the same distance in around an hour, there's no way my internet connection could beat ~8GB/hr, or approximately 18Mbps (if I calculated correctly).

A trained pigeon with a large enough capacity USB stick stuck to it will be faster than the internet in almost any country. It scales great too, just add more pigeons. It's a pipe. The problem is the latency sucks. The post office (or in this case pigeon army) has unlimited bandwidth, but terrible latency. If you want to send some one a few blue rays' worth of data, do you email it? Then your fired. Just put them in the damn post, it will get there much faster.

If you want to send some one a few blue rays' worth of data, do you email it? Then your fired. Just put them in the damn post, it will get there much faster.

If you email it most likely your email server rejects it, at that point you try FTP which sucks because the remote office around the world has a terrible link speed and your outgoing FTP is throttled so you suggest to your IT department that you set up bittorrent at the offices with fast connections because this data must be transferred weekly. Finally after 3 weeks of back and forth you settle for the post office because while everyone including your boss has come up with 5 better solutions than mail the IT guys refuse to implement any of them.

Good for the IT guys. You know you have good people if they don't impliment a bad solution that won't work, regardless of pressure from above. It's a bandwidth/latency issue. It gets to a point where you are better of sending lots of data slowly then small amounts fast. No amount of screaming, shouting and jumping up and down at IT is going to help.

The carriers have an intrinsic collision avoidance
system, which increases availability. Because IP only guarantees best effort delivery, loss
of a carrier can be tolerated. With time, the carriers are self-regenerating. Audit trails are automatically generated, and can often be
found on logs and cable trays.

Excellent proof of concept by Lord Vetinari. I do hope Moist Von Lipwig gets this contract as well. Increased pigeon poo fertilizer along the main trunk lines should help agriculture in the region as well. Remind me to participate in the subsequent land-snatching.

Back in the day (mid 1970s) when IBM appended "AM" (for Access Method) to all of their protocols, we had BTAM (Basic Telecommunications), TCAM (TeleCommunications), and VTAM (Virtual Telecommunications, which is still around today) to move data. It was widely acknowledged that when it came to raw bandwidth, even over long distances, PTAM (Pickup Truck Access Method) beat them all. You load up a pickup truck with hundreds or thousands of 200MB tapes and drive it across the country.

What about latency? Surely it is orders of magnitude larger with pigeons than with even worst possible fiber connections? We are talking minutes versus tens to hundreds of a second. Something anybody with knowledge on networks knows already. Then again, since for most IT companies bandwidth is more important than latency, I guess pigeons make more sense to them. In fact, that is what I would have used. Every time I had to send a gigabyte of media data back when I was in advertisement media business, I wish I had remembered about pigeons. So, for any case where latency is not a factor, pigeons rule. In all other cases however we need any kind of fiber.

Well, yeah, you're not likely do do VoPTP (Voice over Pigeon Transfer Protocol) or play an online game using pigeons as packet carriers. The latency is bad. But this was a POC (Pigeon of Concept) that will lead to an RFC (Request Flying Carrier) and eventually it will go Beta (Birds Enabling Telecommunications Applications).

Apparently it took about 57 minutes to get the data off the card onto the recipient computer. So it was hardly a trivial amount of data. Maybe they confused mega bits with mega bytes like so many other ignorant lusers.

In a (very) rough calculation I worked out that if they sent an 8GB card, then their net connection was a little over 43Kbps. I don't think even SA has stuck to modem implemented internet, so I would say they were probably sending more than 8GB.

Until I dumped them last month for cable, Verizon DSL "broadband" was often slower than dialup - probably more than half the time... and when working, the fastest I ever got was 180kbps. That's bright, shiny "Made in USA" bandwidth which despite countless calls to Verizon complaining, they claimed was just fine and not a problem with their network.

(Now I have cable at around 6-10 times the speed for about half the price. Suck it, Verizon.)

I could transfer 4gb faster by tossing an SD card across the room than I could by sending it over our LAN, that doesn't mean the LAN is bad, or slow, it just means that "a Truck full of harddrives has more bandwidth than the whole of the internet"[admitting that "whole of the internet" is a meaningless term in terms of bandwidth]- point being that bandwidth isn't everything

Now all I have to do , is capture and train all the pigeons here in my downtown area, move to Africa, and start my own carrier pigeon company for all those interested in saving money and also having quicker file transfers, and I will be filthy rich!

Seriously though, it speaks volumes that a pigeon can carry a card with data faster then we can download...oh wait, this is in Africa,so I guess its because its still a 3rd world country???

Why is everybody discussing the technical validity of using pigeons to transfer data? (except of course to generate semi-interesting puns and whatnot)It is a PR stunt to get more non-technical people to take note of Telkom's practices putting a brake on parts of our economy. (nevermind the breaks our "government" is putting on...)

Sneaker net has always had the highest bandwidth recorded. Want to send 10 TB of data across the world? Would you try uploading it to their server, or sending 5 2TB hard drives by Fed Ex? Which one do you think will get there faster?

A couple of important things were omitted that are important to the pigeon - in particular the time and money that went into training the bird to make that flight. They didn't exactly just reach out of their office window and grab any pigeon that happened to be nearby.

I don't think thats important at all. Its not like they reached out the window, and grabbed any phone line either.
This was simply comparing quality of service between two provider's networks. Telekom lost.

A couple of important things were omitted that are important to the pigeon - in particular the time and money that went into training the bird to make that flight. They didn't exactly just reach out of their office window and grab any pigeon that happened to be nearby.

I don't think thats important at all. Its not like they reached out the window, and grabbed any phone line either. This was simply comparing quality of service between two provider's networks. Telekom lost.

My point is that the time and money invested in the bird is not trivial. If the pigeon is to carry something to point B from point A, someone needs to deliver the pigeon from point B to point A in order for that to happen. And that person will then themselves return to point B (if they live or work at point B) or else they originated at point A (if they live or work there). Hence there is a round trip by car (or other vehicle) for someone between A and B that should be considered. That round trip took

Homing pigeons are not trained. Their ability is innate [wikipedia.org].

Kind of true, but training helps, that's why pigeon racing is a sport - different training methods produce different results (though breeding helps too, of course).
In war, they were often trained to find a "moving home"... an ability that is certainly needs training

Actually, it is. If they nest in one office, then returning to that office (from any starting location) is innate. Training helps with speed of transit, but they do it of their own accord. Of course, to make the trip again, they need to be boxed up and shipped back to the starting office.

so you just have one pigeon from the other office boxed up with your memory stick. the first pigeon arrives, you take the other office's pigeon out of the box, take the memory stick, put in a new memory stick, put your pigeon in the box, attach the box to the previously boxed pigeon, and send him back from whence it came.

What a pigeon does is that it finds back its home.
So what you usually do is breed some pigeons in your dovecote and give some to the people who need to send you messages. Not a lot of training is required but you need a way to deliver a pigeon to the sender of the message.

Furthermore, when you look at throughput for physical transportation, you have to factor in the impact of deadheads (moving an empty truck, plane, or messageless pigeon somewhere so it can pick up a load). In the case of carrier pigeons, they just fly toward home, so if you want to send another message you're going to have to carry them back to the source by some other means of transportation which likely takes much longer than the pigeons flight. Averaging in the return trip, the crummy network is going to

"Just a few days after this Slashdot article, South Africa's largest telecoms provider, Telkom (which has been taking flak for years for its shoddy and overpriced service), is being pitted against a homing pigeon to see which can deliver 4GB of call centre data logs quickest over a distance of around 80km (50 miles). According to the official website, the race is set to take place September 10."

Actually, we know it was 4 GB and that in 2 hours the Telekom transferred only 4% of that data. Let's say approximately 4000 MB for ease of calculation. A whole 4% of that is 160 MB transferred in two hours.

Now bytes are not bits, and network speeds are usually specified in megabits per second. Allowing for handshake, headers, etc, and again going just for a rough ballpark figure, I'll take x10 for the bytes to bits conversion.